RDKirk wrote:
Back in the days when we just used a few thousand watts of tungsten bulbery for portraits, the first thing we did was to set the fill light and the fill exposure.
For those of you younger than dirt, I feel the need to point out that this was one way, but certainly not the only way.

One of my lighting teachers at Art Center was Charlie Potts, who was director of the Photography Department at the time. He was from the old school, even worked with Edward Steichen during WWII in the Naval Photographic Institute. He and others taught us a different approach; setting your key and working from there.

It was an interesting time. We were doing portraits with hot lights shooting 4x5 B&W sheet film. I think you had to have been in the program a year before you could check out strobes. It was fun working with cine lights. We had some Juniors at our disposal, I don't recall if we had any Seniors. 5kw might be a little much! Of course, we had a number of Babys and Inka Dinks.

I need to dig out my Kodak binders. I have a couple, one with B&W films from the early '50's and the other a catalog of films from the mid '60's. There were a number of B&W portrait films available. As part of the specs, they all had H&D curve charts showing the curve in different developers. Some portrait photographers liked a long toe and gentle shoulder, some preferred shorter toe and longer straight line. A lot of old timers I knew liked a "full" negative. Blocking highlights didn't bother them too much, but they were deathly afraid of a thin negative.

cgardner wrote:If you've been really bad in your past life all you get is a single light and a reflector..


Dear Dr. Fill,

OK, I'll try to be good.
But thinking I should prepare for the worst, I reread your posts again and I'm still a bit perplexed.
I really want to get this right should I find myself in this predicament.
So how would I set my reflector for fill without setting my single key light first?

Regards,
Imso Confused





----------------------------------------------------
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts."
John Wooden (a pretty decent coach, by all accounts)

PS. Can I stipulate that reflector as a Tri-Grip?

Carmen Miranda wrote:
PS. Can I stipulate that reflector as a Tri-Grip?
Can my single light be a north light?

I've got a ton of carte de visites and cabinet cards and I'm bowled over at the lovely light achieved with just a north light and flats (big reflectors).

One of my teachers, fashion photographer Tommy Mitchell, had a studio in LA and it had a huge north light window. You could partition sections off to control it. The window also continued halfway down the wall so you could somewhat control direction. Lovely, lovely light.

If I can't have a north light, give me a tri-grip and an old Photogenic "hog trough". Most photographers used the SkyLight as a big fill. If you turned it on edge to your subject, you could achieve a lovely wraparound light. Ratio was great for B&W and could be easily tamed with just a touch of reflector fill.

I think I'm with the crazies in this thread. I hate having to think. I carry around a pack of white coffee filters in my bag. I stack 3 over my lens and set custom WB. Done and done... never out of a hundred K in temp when I bring it up in post. It's pretty much the same as ExpoDisc, except I'm a cheap ass.

In fact, I don't even know where my white balance card is anymore.

Dear Confused,

The answer to your question of course is that you can't set a fill LIGHT if you are not using a fill LIGHT.

But your question points out the dilemma with reflectors. The lack of independent control of the fill. Indoors it is nearly impossible to get a reflector where it where will catch and reflect the key light, where is will not create unfilled areas on a face, and not be in the photo. Its like winning the Trifecta at the Kentucky Derby.

Fill position is counter-intuitive which is why most beginners put it on the side opposite the key light and wind up with crossed-lighting with flat highlights and dark unfilled shadows. Fill needs to go in the places the camera sees and the camera shouldn't see shadows from the fill source. Where does fill not create shadows? When it comes from near the camera axis. Flat light may suck for just about everything else, but its the perfect direction for fill.

If someone learns lighting with one light and a reflector they may never, ever, see neutral fill. The way that some shadows of the face in the low areas are dark and harsh are accepted as the norm. But if one starts from a baseline of using two lights in a pattern of key light overlapping shadowless neutral fill where the shadows are even and the transitions buttery smooth, the potholes shaded fill creates in a lighting pattern are immediately obvious.

Outdoors a reflector is easier to use because outdoors there is light in all directions to reflect. In the most common outdoor portrait scenario, putting the subject's back to the sun and filling the front the reflector winds up pointing at the sun. That provides the needed light, but can also tend to blind the subject resulting is squinting. Use flash in the same situation and the same result can be obtained without the squinting

The ideal way to use reflectors indoors is to let neutral fill from the direction of the camera meet the technical criteria of lifting the shadow to the point the lame short range sensor can record detail, then use reflectors as need on the sides to nuance the shadow modeling on the sides of the face...

One light and a reflector? I 'd consider than enlightenment...

It worked for this guy.

http://tinyurl.com/yh4wpds

Who said a reflector doesn't work? Not I. I learned with a window and a reflector and I use them all the time. The ones in the shot above are 35 years old. But also use flash for fill when it does a more effective job. I'm not militantly stubborn when it comes to tools, refusing to use one or the other because of some belief its a "purer" form of lighting. I just work the problem and pick the tool that offers the best balance of results and convenience.

Its not about the tools, but learning to use them effectively. Like the gray card. It's a good tool for WB, and had a role in exposure for negatives when used with an averaging reflection meter, but its not an effective tool for judging digital highlight exposure. A reflector is very effective outdoors where there is light coming from all directions to bounce, less effective indoors when you need to choose between putting it where the fill is needed or where is can catch the light and be out of the way.

All I'm suggesting here is about fill is that its role be understood, and that the signs that it isn't working effective l be recognized: nose darkest shadow on the face, no light in smile lines and corners of the mouth, dark crescent shadow around the base of the nostril. Avoiding those things is just common sense: don't let the fill get shaded. Doesn't matter if the fill comes from the sky, a reflector or a flash, if its shaded its not doing its job.

As for your old photos Doug, in one of my photo books, "Portrait and the Camera" by Robert Lassam, the curator of the Fox Talbot Museum there is a photo of a large photo studio in the early 1900s. its basically a greenhouse with a glass ceiling and walls, with dark drapes hung over some of the windows to block the light and scrims over others to diffuse it. I don't see any artificial lights or any reflectors, just some clever use of subtractive lighting.

In any case fill wasn't needed with B&W because contrast could be controlled via the negative development to fit the range of the print. The first test I did with the zone system is put a person in direct sun and adjust exposure index and neg. development could reproduce the everything with detail, with no fill other than the light from the sky. There is actually lots of wonderful fill from the sky in a backlit shot. The problem now is that the dynamic range of a digital sensor isn't as long as that of a B&W neg. so it can't take full advantage of the fill.

Joe Zeltsman was a clever guy. He mounted his fill lights on the ceiling out of the way and bounced them off the back wall of his studio. Like in any lighting ratio his fill and his color negative exposures where a constant. The only thing that he had to vary was the strength of the overlapping key light, making the same incident strength for a 2:1 ratio, a stop stronger for 3:1, etc. Not sure if he used a reflector.

Chuck

Micky Bill wrote:
One light and a reflector? I 'd consider than enlightenment...

It worked for this guy.

http://tinyurl.com/yh4wpds

Penn tended to use a very large, broad light with a more-or-less reflective environment.

What Chuck is saying about the misuses of sticking a smallish reflector next to the subject is true.

What I am saying is that there are different ways to light things, and Chuck's way of lighting is just one of them. Many people who are new to photography don't know what else can be done, Penn's work shows that shadows are nothing to be afraid of.

Micky Bill wrote:
Many people who are new to photography don't know what else can be done, Penn's work shows that shadows are nothing to be afraid of.
Horrors! Look at the shadows here:

Micky Bill wrote:
What I am saying is that there are different ways to light things, and Chuck's way of lighting is just one of them. Many people who are new to photography don't know what else can be done, Penn's work shows that shadows are nothing to be afraid of.

That was never the question, at least not the question Chuck responded to. Chuck was responding to:

So how would I set my reflector for fill without setting my single key light first?

The real (short) answer is that a small reflector does not do fill very well. Chuck spent a lot of time fully explaining why it doesn't. There was nothing there about being afraid of shadows.

I've got a '60s-era portrait course by Penn at home. I'll dig it out and take a look, but I don't believe he even used small reflectors.

RDKirk wrote:

That was never the question, at least not the question Chuck responded to. Chuck was responding to:

So how would I set my reflector for fill without setting my single key light first?

The real (short) answer is that a small reflector does not do fill very well. Chuck spent a lot of time fully explaining why it doesn't. There was nothing there about being afraid of shadows.


Actually, the question was never about how well a reflector works but more about how it (and fill) works and it's relationship to the key. Unfortunately it was presented as an obtuse rhetorical question. Dr. Fill simply picked up the ball and ran with it into his own end zone (eg. methodology). I'd flag him for an unsportsmanlike (doing the Zeltzman dance ), but seemed like a safety should be penalty enough. For a full replay in slow motion be sure to check out: End Zone Dance

The simple answer of course is that a reflector needs light to work, just as a fill light needs a primary light source. If there is no primary light source, then a fill light is not a fill, it is the primary or "key" light. Fill, by definition, is always "supplementary" to the key, whether you set it first or not.

This ain't rocket science folks.

By the way if anybody here can set a reflector for proper fill without any light, I will gladly read Chuck's tutorials and Zeltsmann's tome from beginning to end again.

edit: whatever

The simple answer of course is that a reflector needs light to work, just as a fill light needs a primary light source. If there is no primary light source, then a fill light is not a fill, it is the primary or "key" light. Fill, by definition, is always subservient to the key, whether you set it first or not.

Beautifully stated.

Carmen Miranda wrote:

The simple answer of course is that a reflector needs light to work, just as a fill light needs a primary light source. If there is no primary light source, then a fill light is not a fill, it is the primary or "key" light. Fill, by definition, is always subservient to the key, whether you set it first or not.


I don't think we are disagreeing here, just talking past each other because we understand words like "subservient" differently.

I agree with what you say about changing roles of light, but not with your choice of words to express it. I would never use the word "subservient" to describe the role of fill in a lighting pattern. The definition of "subservient" per the dictionary in this context is: "less important, subordinate" and I think shadow detail is actually more important than highlight tone in a photo, which winds up the same in all lighting ratios. As I have mentioned before its the shadow tone which is mostly responsible for the perception of lighting being "hard" or "soft".

Change "subservient" to "supplementary" in your statement and it will be a correct, per the actual dictionary definition of fill light. The dictionary I have describes it as: "a supplementary light used in photography or filming that does not change the character of the main light and is used chiefly to lighten shadows."

That describes neutral axis-fill perfectly.

Whether one chooses to make the shadows in a photo light and soft, or dark and hard, depends on the goal of the photo, but either way it requires the ability to control the fill independently of the main or key light, which I what the reflector vs key light tangent was about. In some cases a reflector might be the best tool for the job, in other a light. It not the tool, is knowing how to use it to get the desired effect "lighten the shadows but not changing the character of the main light".

The Penn portrait works because the dark shadows create a different emotional reaction than light ones would. I've never seen the original, but would guess that the shadows are not maximum black and devoid of detail but rather have a carefully modulated amount of detail controlled precisely with the fill.

As for your riddle about placing fill before key answer this one: Can you find a light switch in the dark? If the answer is "yes" and you've lit a face a few times you should be able to place the reflector where it will need to be to be effective by experience alone. Where is it most effective? Go back and read the definition of fill light

Chuck

cgardner wrote:
I agree with what you say about changing roles of light, but not with your choice of words to express it.


Chuck,

I've never been too good with words. But it's very gratifying to know we can agree on one thing.

How about we stick a fork in this thing and call it good?

Hey, how about those grey cards?

The Penn portrait works because the dark shadows create a different emotional reaction than light ones would. I've never seen the original, but would guess that the shadows are not maximum black and devoid of detail but rather have a carefully modulated amount of detail controlled precisely with the fill.

For that particular portrait of Picasso, Penn used:
Rolliflex with a 75mm f/3.5 lens and a close-up attachment
Plus-X film
1/2 second at f/8
Available light (probably a large window, which he used often).

I've seen a reproduction of the contact sheet--it's very significantly cropped even from a fairly tight head-and-shoulders shot. There is more shadow detail than you can see in this web version.

Dear Carmen, Chuck, RD, & Friends

Three years ago I had the pleasure of attending a week-long class on portraiture taught by Louis Tonsmeire through the Georgia Professional Photographers Association.

He always emphasized beginning with the fill. He said he most often uses an umbrella to get his fill and then uses a softbox for his main.

I'm still having trouble getting used to thinking in those terms, though I'm trying. I've typically started with the main, added another light or reflector for fill, and then added one or more kickers.

--Jaddie

I am definitely not ashamed to take a white towel to a shoot. I briefly explain to what it does for the shot, and the client is happy to be educated.

I do plan on buying an exposure meter before long though.

As for w/b, I mostly use my 580EXII's or 1600, so it's DL w/b for me. Sometimes cloudy, shade, whatever. I've got a gray card, but it's all f&*$ed up from going on all of the shoots, so I don't use it now.